Flying!

Wow, I had my first flying lesson today. Well, “lesson” is a bit too much maybe. I’m flying with FS 2004 for a few years now and enjoy the aviation world in general very much. I’ve always wanted to get a bit more of closer experience but never got round to.

My wife Diane gave me a voucher for an introductory flying lesson in last year’s xmas calendar (Depending where you live, you might (not) know this tradition, it’s basically a calendar containing a little (or bigger) gift for each of the days from 1st of December to the 24th of December). Anyway, today I went flying and did the lesson and it was a totally amazing experience. It’s just not comparable with any bloody simulation. The Wellington Aero Club is based at the official Wellington airport, so all the training and recreation flight movements are done among the regular traffic constisting of Boing 737s, Airbus 320s etc. This is very exciting and thrilling!

We were flying a Piper Tomahawk and I’ll do it again. I will – for sure! I will do my private pilot license – rather sooner than later. This is not really a surprise as I was very confident that I would enjoy it, but this lesson further confirmed it. So – getting the money is a bit of a tricky thing, the whole PPL license would cost about 10,000-12,000 NZ$ (roughly 6000 Euro). Well, this is doable, certainly – but not just straight and right now out of my pocket. They offer several packages, such as a flying solo package which itself is cheaper than the equivalent amount of hours etc – so I will look into that.

If you like this blog and/or me and want to support getting me flying – there’s paypal donate button on the right! Other people have Amzon wishlists, I need money for my PPL 😉 Donations of 100 NZ$ or more get a flight with me as soon as I have my PPL (travel/accomodation and expenses to and in New Zealand have to be covered by yourself 🙂

That’s cool. My wife gave me an ‘introduction to flight’ thing a few years ago – it was really fun but it was just too expensive to even contemplate taking lessons – because then I’d be shopping for a plane 🙂

I’ve since taken up RC Airplanes – a lot cheaper and I can crash all I want! 🙂